From Harlem to New Haven: The Emergence of the Advocacy Planning Movement in the late 1960s

Abstract

In the United States of America, the term ‘urban renewal’ refers to a federal government program that began in 1954 with the purpose of replacing blighted urban areas with new urban projects. In contrast to the connotation of ‘urban renewal’ in North-Western European cities — where the term was linked with a democratisation movement and the establishment of new forms of participatory governance — within the American context ‘urban renewal’ was related to the implementation of top-down strategies that “decimated older black neighbourhoods, forcing relocation in rapidly ghettoising areas, or in some cases creating physical barriers that confined African Americans to certain areas.”1 The paper examines certain democratic practices in such a charged environment, shedding light on the ways in which top down urban renewal projects were often aimed against black communities, exemplified with two case studies that are closely connected to the critique of urban renewal in the United States: the founding in 1964 of the Architect’s Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) as the first organization solely devoted to advocacy planning in the United States, and the establishment in 1969 of the City Planning Forum at Yale School of Art and Architecture, an independent governing body which consisted of all full-time faculty members and students and — in dialogue with the civil rights movement — sought to bring greater diversity to the department.